Introduction

Hi, I am Tianru Zhang, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Uppsala Vision-Language Learning Lab of Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University.

I hold a PhD in Scientific Computing from Uppsala University. Previously, I received MSc degree in Statistics and Data Science from ENSAI (National school of statistics and information analysis of France), and BSc degree in Mathematics from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Before joining Uppsala University, I also worked as a research assistant in Fujitsu R&D center, Beijing, and an intern Data Scientist in IRT SystemX, Paris.

My research areas include Data Management, Multimodel LLMs, Representation Learning, and Federated Machine Learning. Particularly, I am interested in the application of ML technologies in the fields of data management, heterogeneous learning via FL, and efficient video understanding in multimodal LLMs.

Projects

Selected projects. See the full list on the projects page.

ReStore

RL-based Data Migration in Multi-Tiered Storage Systems.

Project page

InfoHier

Hierarchical Information Extraction via Encoding and Embedding.

Project page
See all projects

News

Latest updates. See the full list on the news page.

[2026-08] Our paper PROVE: Probabilistic Visual Grounding via Patch-Level Evidence for Vision-Language Models is accepted to WACV 2027.

[2026-07] Our paper Generative Text Modeling and Language-Guided Visual Attention for Deciphering Palimpsests is accepted to TACL.

[2026-07] Our BSc thesis students has successfully defended their thesis Evaluation Metrics for AI-Based Handwriting Reconstruction: Proposing the Handwriting Fréchet Distance. Congratulations to Pontus Ahlberg, Ivar Hammarberg, Elin Matsson, and Isac Persson!

[2026-06] Our demo paper ReStore-in-Action is accepted to VLDB 2026.

[2026-06] Our MSc thesis student Hugo Eidmann has successfully defended his thesis Probabilistic Keyframe Selection for Efficient Video Understanding with Multimodal LLMs. Congratulations!

[2026-03] Our paper ReStore is accepted to ACM SIGMOD 2026.

See all news

Selected Publications

Highlighted recent work. See the full publication list or Google Scholar.

ReStore-in-Action: Adaptive Multi-Tier Storage Management via Intelligent Data Migration Policy

Shadman Saqib Eusuf, Tianru Zhang, Teona Bagashvili, Manos Athanassoulis, Tarikul Islam Papon. In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2026. PDF · DOI

Generative Text Modeling and Language-Guided Visual Attention for Deciphering Palimpsests

Robin Hollifeldt, Tianru Zhang, Jessica Ström, Ekta Vats. In Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026. PDF · DOI

ReStore: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Data Migration in Multi-Tiered Storage

Tianru Zhang, Tarikul Islam Papon, Teona Bagashvili, Salman Toor, Manos Athanassoulis. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2026. PDF · DOI

InfoHier: Hierarchical Information Extraction via Encoding and Embedding

Tianru Zhang, Li Ju, Prashant Singh, Salman Toor. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.08717, 2025. PDF

Autonomous Hierarchical Storage Management via Reinforcement Learning

Tianru Zhang. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (ISSN 2150-8097), 2024. PDF · DOI

See all publications

Talks

Talk title (template)

Event name, Location · Month Year · Slides

Another invited talk

University seminar (virtual) · Year

Teaching

  • 2026 — 1RT730: Large Language Models and Societal Consequences of Artificial Intelligence (role: lecturer / seminar)
  • 2025 — 1RT730: Large Language Models and Societal Consequences of Artificial Intelligence (role: lecturer / seminar)
  • 2024 — 1TD184: Optimization (role: TA)
  • 2024 — 1DT069: Data Engineering 1 (role: lecturer)
  • 2023 — 1DT069: Data Engineering 1 (role: lecturer / TA)
  • 2022 — 1DT069: Data Engineering 1 (role: lecturer / TA)
  • 2021 — 1DT069: Data Engineering 1 (role: TA)

CV

Download CV (PDF)